Posted
by
Roblimo
on Saturday April 09, 2011 @11:10AM
from the voyage-to-see-what's-on-the-bottom dept.

mikejuk writes "You may have heard about the swashbuckling adventures to be undertaken by Virgin Oceanic -- visits to the bottom of the deepest parts of the oceans of the world. As Sir Richard Branson said at the launch of Virgin Oceanic, more men have been to the moon than have ventured further down than 20,000 feet. As long as everything goes according to plan, everyone should be able to experience a virtual trip to the bottom of the ocean, courtesy of Google Earth."

The computer renderings I've seen show a large dome over the cockpit (please hold the bloody seamen jokes).

Considering that the other submersibles have (relatively) tiny portholes that are 6"(?) thick, how is this large dome possible? Is it made out of a different material (I think I heard somewhere it was quartz) whereas the other submersibles were plexiglass? Has there been some major advance in creating large convex transparent structures that allow the pressure to be optiminally distributed? Or are the computer renderings just pretty pictures and the real vehicle will have much smaller ports to look out of?:(

By the way this reminds me of the underwater transport in one of the first Star Wars that Ben Kenobi uses to visit Jar Jar Bink's undersea city. They appear to travel to great depths in their small craft but when they surface, the "dome" turns out to be a forcefield that can be turned off with a switch! Some forcefield; if that kind of technology was readily available for other uses (personal armor, shields) it would seem that it should play a much bigger role in the series. But I digress, who ever expects commercial science fiction to be logically consistent?